A Research Agenda for Measuring GDP at the County Level

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes gross domestic product (GDP) statistics for the nation, states, and metropolitan areas. GDP by county statistics would provide a much richer picture of the geographic distribution of the nation’s economic activity to assist analysts in the assessment of local economic performance and policymakers in the development of strategies to promote economic growth. This paper identifies a research agenda to produce such statistics and uses a simple methodology to produce county GDP statistics for a few case studies based on county earnings by industry. These experimental statistics illustrate the kind of information on industry structure and local economic activity that can be uncovered with GDP by county statistics. Further research is needed to identify additional source data and investigate alternative methodologies and various modelling techniques that can be used to generate proper output measures at the county level.